Authors

Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It’s NAIDOC Week and the theme this year is “Our Languages Matter”. The Warlpiri language is co-author Valerie Napanangka Patterson’s mother tongue. Like most Australian Aboriginal languages, Warlpiri is threatened from multiple directions, including by the Australian education, health and legal systems, and the dominant culture’s general apathy and lack of support for maintaining these globally endangered languages. Many have already been lost.

Even today in Australia linguicide persists. As recently as February 2016 the NT politician Bess Nungarrayi Price, whose first language is Warlpiri, was ruled disorderly by the NT Parliament and prevented from speaking Warlpiri in the House.

For the remaining Australian languages to survive, as Valerie Napanangka stated on ABC’s Q&A on Monday, Australians need to work as a team, and that’s what we’ve done in writing this article. To the best of our knowledge this is the first ever article written entirely in an Aboriginal language and published on a mainstream media outlet in this country. And Aboriginal languages really do matter - to all Australians. Language and identity are indivisible.

“Dreamtime” manu “Dreaming”: nyiyaku?

“Everywhen”: tarnnga-warnu

Valerie Patterson Napanangka, circa 1986. Napanangka was also a major contributor to the translation of Storm Boy by Colin Thiele - the first English language novel to be translated into the Warlpiri language.